The Prodigal Return of San Francisco
Why SF, for all its faults, is still the best place in the world to build something important.
“Better three hours too soon, than a minute too late.” - William Shakespeare (The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 2, Scene 2)
There is a painting in the Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, in room 254 of the New Hermitage building that hangs silently, unpretentiously, preserving a stoically modest existence amongst the works of the great Old Masters of European art. The depicted scene is overwhelmingly simple, and exists far from complexities of many of the great artists of this time period — A young man kneels into the merciful chest of his father, as a group of spectators look on, expressing a range of curious emotion at the scene unfolding before them. One may find it peculiar then, that historians have said about the piece, that it is “a picture which those who have seen the original […] may be forgiven for claiming as the greatest picture ever painted.”
This production is that of a 17th century Dutch painter by the name of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, entitled The Return of the Prodigal Son. The painting depicts an allegory from the biblical book of Luke, a story of a young man, who has finally returned to his family’s home from years of arduous travel. Spiritually broken-down and mentally dilapidated, he falls into his fathers arms after having squandered his inheritance and since descended into despondency and impoverishment. The son has come back to the father, humiliated and asking for forgiveness, as well as a position as a servant in his father’s house after coming to a stark realization that even his fathers servants, have a better life than he. To the right of the exchange stands his brother, who looks down upon the sight of his flesh and blood with cutting judgement. In the book of Luke the brother states:
"Behold, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed a commandment of yours, but you never gave me a goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this, your son, came, who has devoured your living with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him."
— Luke 15:29–30
To which the father responds:
"But it was appropriate to celebrate and be glad, for this, your brother, was dead, and is alive again. He was lost, and is found"
— Luke 15:32
Fever Dream
The last few years in the San Francisco have felt like something out of a dystopian hellscape mixed with a post-apocalyptic LSD trip. A Groundhog Day-esque existence, spent carefully traversing human fecal matter, spent syringes and blackened pipes, shattered dreams and car glass, all laying strewn across concrete sidewalks where more people live than the buildings they surround. For those who managed to make it unscathed through the ground-level no-mans land, stepping around biological land-mines and dodging random threats and acts of extreme violence, the reward was substantial: progressively higher taxation, a continuous reduction in public services and safety, and an ever expanding cabal of blundering local and state-level politicians passing the buck onto their constituents.
While this was broadly an endemic problem throughout the State of California as a whole (especially through the shockingly bizarre pandemic era), the effects were particularly acute in the Bay Area, and most notably San Francisco. With increasingly high rents, and decreasingly less of a need to go into the office for most technology companies, the remaining faction of hardline San Franciscans largely stayed because they were desperately holding on to a dream, of a time when the Bay Area was an exceptional zeitgeist of the best and brightest all collectively working on important and unique problem sets.
For many of those in technology especially, 2020 was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Already spurned by a local political system that seemed intent on disenfranchising locally built businesses via taxation and increased oversight, already debilitated from the perennial threats to basic safety and sovereignty, already exhausted from paying so much and receiving so little, many of our friends and colleagues decided to seek greener pastures, whether in New York, Austin, Miami, or elsewhere. And can you blame them? The promise of what San Francisco once was — a place where anybody could come with a strong idea, immense ambition, all to reach remarkable heights, had left not with a bang, but a whimper.
“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.” - T.S. Eliot
Dark Ages
The Dark Ages (also known as the Migration Period), was a period of ~900 years in European history marked by large-scale migrations that led to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Whilst this was happening, these former territories were subsequently settled by various tribes, establishing the next generation of post-Roman kingdoms. This would largely continue on until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which forced Greek scholars to migrate into Italy (most notably Florence), and begin the exchange of information that would lead to a Cambrian explosion of new ideas colloquially referred to as the Renaissance.
It is difficult to argue that the years of 2019 - 2022 were anything but San Francisco’s Dark Ages. We witnessed before our very eyes the rapid descent of a kingdom once endowed, to a poor simulation of what once was. In fact, I am sure that many of those reading this who decamped to more tropical, night-life filled pastures would argue that the city is still squarely rooted in the darkness. And they may be partially right. For all intents and purposes, modern day San Francisco is still extremely flawed in that it largely lacks the dimensionality that gives any great city across the world its ‘buzz’ — that special feeling where from the second you open your eyes to the second you close them, you truly and deeply believe that anything is possible in your life. New York and London always have that feeling. Los Angeles sometimes has that feeling. It remains to be seen if Miami has that feeling.
A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one - Aristotle
But what if I were to tell you that ‘buzz’ is not the point of a place like San Francisco? What if I were to follow up with the idea that the lack of dimensionality is in fact a feature and not a bug? The deficiency of cultural breadth is one of the key drivers that allows great things to be built so consistently over such a long period within the Bay Area. There’s really not shit to do in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and the majority of Silicon Valley for that matter, and yet in 2022 at its height, the aggregate value of public companies founded in this small sliver of the world exceeded $14 trillion. Relentless focus on the task at hand is increasingly a factor not appreciated by modern generations, and there has been no more boring time (read: focusable time) to be in the Bay Area than the last few years.
And that is why right now, counterintuitively for most, San Francisco (and the Bay Area broadly) will continue to be the primordial ooze from which the world’s next great ideas will emerge. When you aggregate a group of people together who are content with the monotony, and yet simultaneously ambitious enough to continue to build in the face of the crumbling society around them, magic invariably happens. And not just once, but over and over again.
The Artificial Savior
If there is one place where we can directly point to the fact that San Francisco is emerging from its gloom, and experiencing a rapid diversification of meaningful ideas, it is the roughly eighteen blocks between Oak Street and Fulton Street in the middle of the city. Known as Hayes Valley by the majority, increasingly Cerebral Valley by some, and occasionally Bayes Valley by those most in the know, the Victorian and Edwardian hacker homes and apartments that intermittently dot these streets have progressively become the hotbed for innovation and rabid hype in the modern day technology cycle.
While many patronize what is going on in the artificial intelligence (AI) space as yet another example of venture capitalists getting far too ahead of their proverbial skis, the intersective matrix of boredom, youthful exuberance, ‘grind-set’ mentality, and large language models is undoubtedly giving way to a meaningful change to our landscape. It is exactly during these moments in time, where there are significant movements in attention to new technological paradigms, in which the largest gains both economically and societally take place. We’ve seen it with mobile, we’ve seen it cloud, and we’ve even seen it with crypto to some extent — but artificial intelligence will likely be the largest shift of them all, so long as you are gazing on a long enough logarithmic scale.
While AI and its various applications have quickly grasped the world’s attention and began to modulate the layman’s beliefs of what is possible, it has also had a monumental effect on the spirit of San Francisco. Although I can already envision the Twitter anons typing “Cope!” as quickly as their little fingers will let them, it’s undoubtedly true — over the last few months there has been a palatable shift in the very fabric of the city, and the trickle down effect can be seen across the surge of new products and services being built every day. Dinner parties suddenly feel more rife with conversations of the future’s outsized possibilities, groups of friends in Dolores Park increasingly and
animatedly chat about important developments they’ve made on their grand ideas throughout the week, and more and more people forego the diaspora, and prodigally, humbly, return to the house they thought they left for good.
San Francisco is not a place that you move if you are looking for culture. Hell, its not even a great place to move if you are simply looking for a good time. It is however, the Mecca for those seeking a quantum of individuals and ideas who are willing to sacrifice these earthly pleasures for the pursuit of building something meaningful for the future.
The last few years in the city, as well as the Bay Area at large, have undoubtedly been a dark, dark era even for a place that clearly has always had its faults. And these faults have not necessarily gone anywhere — all one needs to do is take a stroll through fentanyl laced air of the Tenderloin, or a read through the increasingly biased local news to catch up with what London Breed is up to, to realize that this fact unfortunately persists as true to this day.
However, there presently is a shift happening that is hard to ignore. And while many people, especially those who have left the very city that built their careers, might argue that this is not the case, for those who are still hanging on, the dream of what San Francisco once was, feels closer than ever.
The City is slappin’. Keep it hyphy.
-EXITS
I look forward to enjoying the fruits of SF’s labor from as far away as I can get. (I did like the piece though)